Many people keep journals for their mental health benefits. Journaling about your feelings can reduce mental distress and is a highly encouraged practice for people dealing with anxiety.
Audio-journaling, one of the recently introduced forms of journaling, has proven to be effective at this. Let’s take a look at the best audio-journaling apps.
1. Journify
Journify lets you make simple audio recordings. It recommends daily five-minute recordings that help you capture the essence of your emotions before your thoughts begin to stray.
Journify’s simple interface allows you to easily incorporate journaling into your day. You choose what happens to your recordings; you can share them on various platforms as a written text or audio transcript. All your journal entries are encrypted automatically, so no third-party can access them without your consent.
Journify also has a mood analyzer and burnout tracker feature that monitors and breaks down your mood and mental state over time. It helps you check in on your daily sleep, energy, and motivation to know when there’s a decline or improvement in your wellbeing.
Download: Journify for Android | iOS (Free, in-app purchases available)
2. Murmur
Murmur is another audio-journaling app with easy-to-use features. Murmur serves as your online voice diary, tracking your daily inputs on your voice calendar. It allows you to tell the story about your day in your own words, putting down your emotions as they come.
Murmur focuses on capturing the emotions and different ways you feel during the day with your voice. At the end of the day, you can listen to your recordings to understand your victories and areas to focus on.
Murmur has notification features that remind you to log your feelings and thoughts as frequently as you want to. It also has five levels of emotions to choose from before you begin each recording. This way, you can track your emotions to see your progress over time.
Download: Murmur for Android | iOS (Free, in-app purchases available)
3. Voice Diary
Voice Diary works effectively as an audio journal, but it’s also more than that, as it also enables you to take pictures and videos to record moments in your day.
You don’t need an internet connection to use this app, making it more accessible on the go. Furthermore, Voice Diary has no limits—you can take as many recordings, pictures, and videos as you like.
To keep your thoughts safe, you can lock your entries with a password specific to your diary.
Download: Voice Diary for Android (Free, in-app purchases available)
4. Success Journal
Anxiety often comes with debilitating mental challenges like low self-confidence and motivation. This daily voice journal will help you improve your self-confidence and bring back your motivation for the day.
Success Journal allows you to record a brief audio entry of 30 seconds (so that you focus purely on that specific moment), where you get to vent, release your emotions, record your wins, or document your losses.
As you frequently update your journal, you get a portfolio of achievements, emotional progress, and can track improvements as the day goes by.
Download: Success Journal for Android (Free, in-app purchases available)
5. Pointo
Pointo is a simple secret journal that lets you speak your story from the heart, keeping a record of what truly matters to you. It helps you keep track of your moods throughout the day in a mini diary using emojis.
Its voice recording feature is useful to record important parts of your day when you feel most anxious or emotional, and it has a reminder feature that reminds you to log your thoughts.
It also helps you get started with daily prompts that keep your thoughts flowing.
Download: Pointo for Android (Free, in-app purchases)
Why Audio-Journaling Helps With Anxiety
You may wonder what makes audio-journaling different from other types of journaling, or what makes speaking your thoughts more effective than writing them out. One of the top answers is the in-the-moment spontaneity that it offers for helping you relieve your anxiety.
1. Its Spontaneity Captures Raw Emotions
Audio-journaling allows you to record your thoughts in their purest form, exactly how you’re thinking them. Because you’re recording in the moment when you feel triggered or anxious, you can capture your raw emotions and thoughts.
Since you often have your phone with you, you can hit the record button whenever you feel overwhelmed or out of control. As you speak, you record exactly how you feel. It can help you process these thoughts and emotions better when you hear them out loud.
2. Talking Helps to Release Inner Tension
Many studies show that talking to yourself about your problems can help you release your pent-up emotions. When you talk about what you feel and the way you feel it, it helps you lose the stress of holding your emotions in.
Through audio-journaling, you can talk help overcome worries, instead of struggling alone in your head.
3. You Capture Speech Faster Than Writing
It’s well-known that many people talk faster than they write. When you’re having feeling overwhelmed, you may find it difficult to put down your thoughts in writing fast enough.
Audio-journaling solves this problem. With audio-journaling apps, you can record your thoughts on the go, without having to type a single word of it. Some of these journals transcribe your spoken thoughts to text if you still like to have your thoughts in the written word.
Self-Care Is Improving Your Mental Health
Managing your anxiety becomes easier when you have a listening ear. This is what these audio-journaling apps offer you. To enjoy the true benefits of audio-journaling for anxiety, be sure to engage with it throughout the day.
Start with a few thoughts and build up as you get comfortable. It may not always start out easy, but consistency pays off in the end.
